That investment bolsters the €40,000 invested by Wayra as part of its incubator program, where Dattch will remain until January.
Being a dating app specifically designed for gay women may not sound too remarkable — but in fact the gay female dating scene is spectacularly badly served, says founder and CEO Robyn Exton. ”Every single dating product that’s been produced for gay women is horrific,” she tells TechCrunch. ”The biggest problem [with rivals’ products] is they don’t have any consideration of how these women are different.”
Exton points out that lazy reskins of gay male platforms have resulted in lesbian dating apps that ask incongruous questions like ‘how much body hair do you have?’ — because they’re just reusing the same gay male templates. Not exactly tailor made for a female target audience then.
The business opportunity Exton saw for Dattch was to take the exact opposite approach to those reskins, and build something that reflects what gay women actually want from a dating app. “Nobody was thinking about a female user, and actually how do women behave? What kind of triggers are they looking for?” she tells TechCrunch.
For now, although anyone in the U.K. can download Dattch, it’s targeting the majority of its user acquisition efforts on London, with some small marketing efforts planned for a few other U.K. cities this year (namely Brighton, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow).
Launching in the U.S. is on the cards for next year, where it will opt for a geofenced city-by-city rollout. Australia is also on its roadmap. After that Exton believes there’s also potential to enter China, where she argues that because there isn’t the same LGBT infrastructure — in terms of gay bars — “apps become really relevant”.
Discussing the angel round Dattch has just closed, Exton says that targeting a less well-served market has sometimes counted against it in conversations with investors. ”It’s not been the simplest to raise for a lesbian app,” she says. “Some people have been quite uncomfortable with what we do.”
“No one has done this before, no one has created an app for this market so I think it’s a new market so possibly there’s a bit more caution around it,” she added.
